I was listening to Open Source Radio on GBH (the NPR station so self-satisfied in its cozy Democrat "culturedness" that I can under. Debra Dickerson, an Harvard-educated Black Woman, told a story of being pulled over by a police car when she was lost in a strange part of town. When the cop rolled down his window, she, in Chris Lydon's paraphrased words, "smothered him with class signals before he could begin to apply his race assumptions." That is, just as the policeman had rolled down his window and pulled alongside her, she launched into a Boston-professional-thinking-aloud-oneway-gabfest "you know I must have turned off at 95 at the wrong exit, I though this might have been 495 but..."

She says that if she had acted like a poor black person and been afraid of the cop, things would have gone less smoothly. By defining herself with a certain class, she was treated differently.

Anyway, being an overpriveleged white boy, class usually makes life easier for me. A cop spies me about to spray-paint a wall and flicks his light to warn me he is watching. Carrying a stereo from my Mom's place to Dad's apartment at 3AM, a passing police car makes a joke. Caught smoking a joint while sitting in my car waiting for a friend, a police man tells me to "put that shit out." Had I been black, I feel these interactions would have gone quite differently.

But while in the Peace Corps I had an experience in which bias was clearly class-based. Usually, as a white guy in West Africa, it was assumed that I was wealthy, educated, etc: upper class. And while compared to the other groups of white people in West Africa I was poor, my six dollars a day still put me in a finiancial class above most of my fellow-villagers, so in general I was lumped into the same class as the Europeans with their air conditioned 4x4's, their homes with running water and electricity and their maids.

But once, this difference was recognized, and I paid a small social price for being recognized as lower class. I was visiting Pendjari National park with a few other Peace Corps Volunteers, but were running late, so had missed the evening feeding by the time we got to the viewing-platform at one of the few water-sources in the park. Our solution was to sleep at the platform to be sure to catch the morning feed. When we arrived, there was a group of German women there, who we convinced to stay at the platform overnight with us.

But an hour after the french bread, Vache qui rit, and boxed wine had been uncorked, the silence of the African night was broken by two beams of light and the rumble of a Peugot. A few minutes later we were being berated by some annoyed Beninois Gendarmes for sleeping in an unauthorized part of the park, and were informed that we needed to sleep at the Park's Hotel.

The women quickly hopped into their SUV and drove off to the Hotel to find a room. We told the police we had planned to camp in the park, and they countered that we were free to camp... at the Park police station.

They weren't kidding.

So, the wealthier German women spent the night at the Hotel, and us schmos spent it at prison. Of course, being Benin we mostly sat by the fire with the Police and chatted, but it is my only example of negative bias based on class rather than race.